I think that, despite people’s dislike of the Turkinator achievement, this is turning out to be a great holiday. There are daily quests, reputation bonuses, a cute pet, and the opportunity to level a skill many people find tedious and skip entirely. Yes, one of my favorites – Cooking.

You can powerlevel Cooking on any of your characters up to Outland levels with little effort, and Northrend levels with a bit more. All of this for any of your characters, no matter what level they are.

Yes, you read that right. Any character can be a Grand Master Cook, regardless of level, and this holiday makes it easy. As someone who powerleveled Cooking and Fishing together the old way, over the course of several days, this change is awesome. Take advantage of the opportunity and level your alt’s skills now.

The strategy is quite simple. Start in either Elwynn Forest or Trisifal Glades, depending on your faction, and empty your bags as much as possible. If you want to collect all the mats up front and then cook, you’ll need 68 slots open.

Start off by training Cooking and Spice Bread. You don’t need any other recipes yet, as they’ll just clutter your Cooking interface. You can always go back and learn them later.

Make a Basic Campfire and start cooking Spice Bread. This will go green around 30, but you’ll need all 4 stacks for the next step, so keep going even if it goes gray.

Cook Spice Bread Stuffing until your skill reaches 50. At that point, go train the Journeyman Cook skill and go back to making stuffing. This recipe goes yellow at 90 and green at 100; I’ve found you should end somewhere around 105-110.

Learn the next recipe, Pumpkin Pie, and start cooking it until your skill reaches 125. Go train the Expert Cook skill and make the rest of the pies. Pumpkin Pie goes yellow at 150 and green at 160, just in time for the next recipe.

You might need to switch cities at this point if you don’t have all the materials (Ironforge for Alliance, Orgrimmar for Horde), but you want to learn Cranberry Chutney and start cooking it. Train your Cooking skill at 200. This recipe will go yellow at 210 and green at 220, but make all 4 stacks.

Again, if you don’t have all the mats, you’ll need to relocate to Darnassus or Thunder Bluff, but follow the same pattern for Candied Sweet Potatoes. I love Sweet Potatoes, and not just because they bring you up to about 280-300 Cooking. Cook everything you’ve got, but stop before you hit 300.

Make sure you have 4-5 stacks of Wild Turkey and Autumnal Herbs, and 8-10 stacks of Honey, train Master Cooking, and then start making Slow-Roasted Turkey. If you have 4 stacks, you should get just about to 350; 5 stacks should take you past it.

Once you’re at 350, train Grand Master and do a happy /dance!

2011 Update: Slow-Roasted Turkey will now stay orange well into the 400s. Once you’ve trained Grand Master, keep on going as long as you can!

Even if you aren’t that organized and end up doing a lot of traveling and turkey hunting, this process takes about 1-2 hours, which is a far cry from the days it used to take using Fishing.

Don’t forget that these items can’t be mailed, but they can be traded, so enlist the aid of some friends to serve as mutual material banks. (They work like conjured items.) High level mages can collect all the materials but the Wild Turkey meat in minutes, and friends can help you swap unused items over to different toons.

* I’m fairly sure that level 1 characters can become Grand Master Cooks, just lock their XP before traveling around to the various cities. Going to test that out this week to be sure.
* Added Horde versions of the ingredients.
* Added count of bag space needed.
* Removed Northrend requirement, all trainers can get you to Grand Master now.

Updates for 2011: Slow-Roasted Turkey now grant orange skillups well into the 400s, so I updated the guide with a new step. I also removed the following advice from Step 1:

Depending on your luck, you may want to have 5 stacks of Wild Turkey meat to get you all the way to 350/Grand Master cooking — at least once the RNG didn’t favor me on the green skillups and I got stopped at 348.

You should now be able to get to Grand Master easily. I’ll do some research and see how many stacks of turkey it takes to get to 425 to train Cataclysm cooking.

just a quick after-thought: even though, at least on my UI, slow-roasted turkey turns gray around 350 it will still give you skill-ups as stated above. 430 seems to be the cap, took about 125 turkeys in total. Once I reached 430 cooking I made another 40 slow roasted turkeys just to be sure (i know its a little overkill) that I wouldnt gain anymore skill ups.

Suggestion: add in a reference to the Macro By flyx here: http://www.wowhead.com/item=44834#comments and not only does it allow you to get the 80 turkeys in about half the time, you can also get Turkinator on just about any character within 5 minutes. Just did it with a Lvl 20 Shaman.

That’s a good macro. I used it (or something similar) my first year, but this year I’ve had a lot of luck running through the south/southwest woods of Elywnn, moonfiring and shield slamming turkeys. I am trying to pinpoint why it’s so easy for me this year – perhaps I didn’t have nameplates on before? Maybe I’m just familiar with the turkey distribution? Not a lot of competition? More turkeys overall?

Still, that macro is really good if you’re having trouble getting Turkinator. Thanks for the link!

I did not get all of my characters maxed (I have 30, that would have taken all week) but I managed to get most of my main & high-levels. In total over 3 days I maxxed cooking on 13 of them using this guide. My main was already at Illustrious, and one of my horde does not have riding yet; also I had to prioritize so some of my less-played DKs will have to do the hard way. But I am going to start working them on small eggs for Winter Veil next week.

I had the best luck with turkeys at a location few if no one ever starts at: around Eastvale Logging camp and just beyond. Turkeys, turkeys everywhere and hardly a player to nuke them.

About CWM

Cynwise's Warcraft Manual is a weblog about many facets of the World of Warcraft: PvP battlegrounds, digital avatars, warlock theory, and having fun with alternate play styles are common topics.